Expat Foodie: Peas on Earth

Are you living abroad, a foreigner living in an alien land? As an expat, surely, you have times when you hanker for familiar foods from your home country, things like Twinkies, pickled herring, spotted dick, vegemite, mopane worms and other mouthwatering delectables. Being Dutch, I crave erwtensoep, thick split pea soup, especially now that it’s winter and cold here in the Eastern US. But I even craved it once in the tropics while sojourning in Kenya. At the time, I wasn’t much of a cook, and making this peasant soup for the first time became an adventure, or rather a disaster that tested my new husband’s love. For your entertainment, I’m offering you the story below. I did once tell it several years ago, but I was reminded of it because, well, I’m making a pot of erwtensoep tonight.

The Case of the Petrified Peas

My cooking education began long ago, far away and high in the sky of the beautiful highlands of Kenya, East Africa, where I lived in the early years of my marriage. One day, on a trip to the capital of Nairobi, I found dried green split peas. I was ecstatic. I could now make erwtensoep, Dutch split pea soup.

Forget whatever you’ve heard of Dutch cuisine (which may not have been encouraging) and just accept on faith that erwtensoep is food for the gods, especially on a dark, cold winter night after you’ve bicycled home through sleet and wind.

There are no winter nights in Kenya, but the evenings in the Highlands can be chilly and I could not wait to make the soup. I wrote my mother for the recipe, which arrived posthaste, and I set off to create my magic with the peas.

Disaster struck early on. After the required hour-and-a-half simmering of the peas they were still not soft. According to my mother, split peas required no overnight soaking, so I had simply put them in water and boiled them, expecting them to disintegrate, as they were supposed to do. I cooked them a little longer. Then a lot longer.

By the time my Peace Corps hero came home from his toil with the local Kikuyu farmers my temper had totally disintegrated while the peas had not. “These peas won’t get soft!” I yelled, as if it were his fault. “I did exactly as I was supposed to do and it’s just not happening!”

“Are you sure?” he asked, looking politely into the pan of boiling green pebbles.

I shoved the Dutch recipe under his American nose. He glanced down. “This is a foreign language to me,” he reminded me gently. “Maybe your mother didn’t write it down correctly.”

I glared at him and he retreated to the living room.

I consulted my American cookbook about split pea soup. In my superior Dutch opinion, the recipe was seriously inferior, but it said the peas should be soaked overnight. Could it be that not all split peas on earth were created equal? Then again, should all the hours of boiling not have made up for the lack of soaking? I was flummoxed, not to speak of mystified.

I had no one to ask for advice. At the time we were living in a dilapidated colonial settler’s house at the edge of a village of mud huts high in the Aberdare Mountains and we had no telephone (no electricity or running water, either, for that matter) and I knew of no other Dutch person in the vicinity to come to my rescue. I was truly on my own. It was a lonely feeling.

However, not one to give up easily, I tried again the next day, having first soaked another pound of the split peas overnight in water from our rain barrel (boiled and strained through a dishtowel). In the morning I brought them to a boil, then simmered them. An hour and a half later I looked into the pan and stirred.

Sorry, dear readers, but here comes the cliché: My heart sank. The peas did not look the least bit soft. I took some out to taste them. They crunched defiantly as I chewed, showing no sign whatsoever of even considering the possibility of disintegrating.

I took my potato masher and pounded on the obstinate peas with a vengeance, which gave me a certain primitive satisfaction, but did nothing to rectify the situation. I ended up with raw pea grit floating in water. Still not ready to give up, I boiled this mess some more, several hours in fact and grew angrier and angrier (I used a polite word here as you can see). I wanted erwtensoep!

Obviously, I wasn’t going to get it.

“What happened to the peas?” my husband inquired as he surveyed his fried-egg sandwich that night. He was a brave man.

“Nothing,” I said through my teeth. “They refused to do what they were supposed to do. They sold me bad peas, that’s all there is to it. They must be a hundred years old. They’re probably petrified! I should demand my money back.”

“I don’t think the peas were bad.”

“I refuse to accept that it is something I did wrong!” I said, trying to sound confident, which I wasn’t.

I rolled my eyes. “We’re in Kenya. Living in a dilapidated wreck of settler’s house in a mud hut village half a mile from the equator. Don’t tell me that I can’t cook Dutch food in Africa near the equator.”

“We’re at quite a high altitude here, 8,000 feet or so,” he stated.

“And what does that have to do with anything?” I asked. “I’m from the Low Countries; what do I know about high altitude?”

“At what temperature does water boil?” My man was beginning to enjoy himself, I could tell.

I gritted my teeth. “At 100 degrees Celsius, at sea level.”

“Right.” He looked at me meaningfully, and enlightenment struck me, or at least I ran smack into some basic physics I remembered: the higher the altitude, the lower the boiling temperature of water.

Which meant that my precious split peas simply didn’t get hot enough to get cooked and disintegrate. I could boil them until doomsday and they would remain crunchy. Unless I used a pressure cooker, which I didn’t own, being poor and married to an equally poor Peace Corps volunteer.

Relief washed over me in waves. It was not my fault! There was still hope for me in the kitchen! Trust me, my culinary confidence in those days was rather shaky. But I did learn an important truth that day:

I love this: “I glared at him and he retreated to the living room.” And then the fact that he dared ask about where the peas went…!

Very entertaining as always.

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January 31, 2013 4:11 pm

Fabiola

Hi, it is the first time I stop by. I am from Brazil and I LOVE dry peas. It is my staple soup when I am in a hurry.
If you don’t own a pressure cook, soak the beans overnight and try again : ) You won’t regret it.

I have a pressure cook for the past year (since my daughter was born). I am afraid of them : )

Sometimes, the peas here boil. And sometimes they don’t. Then a young Brazilian girl [who used to live across the road] told me that old peas and beans don’t boil. She said a lot of old peas / beans are sold here.

Well I had absolutely no idea about the different water temperatures at high altitude so I would have been as equally mystified and frustrated as you were. Love the look of the soup though. It certainly does look like food for the gods – and us. 🙂
Julia

Reminds me of all my culinary calamities when I first invaded my French fiance’s flat in Paris. I boiled brownies and cooked steak so long it resembled a hockey puck. I was only too happy to hang up my apron and hand it over to the French chef in the family.

I would so love ANY chef (but me) in the family, French or otherwise… Keep sneaking in cookbooks and sushi making kids as presents for the kids, but so far no enthusiasm for the kitchen yet on any fronts.

Hi there – glad I stopped by, you never fail to make me laugh, and, just having moved to a new place (also the US) I’m in a bit of a funk and in need of laughs. I had a similar experience once, making hummus. My Lebanese friend had given me the best hummus recipe ever, and it worked like a charm with canned chick peas, but he insisted it would even be better with chick peas cooked from scratch. And soaked before. Well, I soaked the hell out of them and cooked them forever but once I put everything… Read more »

Why it takes longer for water to boil at high altitude? I have no idea. The mysteries of physics and chemistry will most likely never be revealed to me. I have also had a lot of trouble getting dried chickpeas (garbanzo beans) to cook until soft enough to make good hummus, which I also make myself, according to a recipe from a Lebanese neighbor I had in Ghana. I could live on that stuff! By the way, I loved your post The Expat Toilet. Sorry you’re in a funk! Hope it will pass soon!

Thanks. The Expat Toilet was my one bright highlight of the week. Writing about it I mean. Thank goodness for blogging. You know what I really miss? The food processor for some good hummus, my kitchen knives, and the cappuccino machine. Container coming in 10 days hopefully…

How funny – I just made split pea soup (although not the Dutch version) for the first time last week and had some panicky moments myself! I had to cook them longer than the recipe called for, but eventually the peas softened up – thank goodness. Although we’re surrounded by mountains here in Seoul, I don’t think the altitude had anything to do with it!

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January 24, 2013 4:58 am

Sara

I started to laugh as soon as I saw this post as I knew they wouldn’t cook but oh.. you DO tell a tale very well.. very good for one to have a chuckle first thing on a cold and frost morning. Thank you.

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January 24, 2013 4:39 am

Sara

I started to laugh as soon as I saw this post as I knew they wouldn’t cook but oh.. you DO tell a tale very well.. very good for one to have a chuckle first thing on a cold and frost morning.

Most Riveting Tales

Writing as Karen van der Zee I have dreamed up over 30 romance novels published by Harlequin Books and other publishers. Visit my website at www.karenvanderzee.com

My name is Miss Footloose (aka Karen van der Zee)

I'm an expatriate writer with lots of stories to tell. I've seen my Palestinian butcher's bedroom, dined on fertility sausage in Kenya, and almost landed in jail in Uganda. I now live in a village in France but I'm not remodeling an old farmhouse and don't drink wine from my own grapes.